Working Toward Nonviolence in Composition

Abstract

This thesis suggests that composition studies is in need of further efforts to bring the concept and practice of nonviolence into the discipline's theoretical and pedagogical framework. I survey and synthesize existing literature on nonviolence in composition as well as related writing on spirituality in education, feminism, the environment, and moral education. The implications of critical pedagogy and social construction theory for the subject are also considered. Ultimately, I argue for the importance of an approach incorporating the personal and the spiritual on the part of both teachers and students. Such an approach retains a strong social perspective because it works toward an understanding that the self cannot be seen as separate from its others. Guided by these ideas, I present and discuss a proposal for a one-semester university-level composition course entitled 'Writing Nonviolence.' I conclude the thesis by briefly considering alternate pedagogical models and by calling for further exploration, testimony, and commitment by teachers and scholars of composition and rhetoric.